


Slow Burn

by Surgeworks



Series: Genesis [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (can't really add the relationship tags outright, F/M, Jonah Magnus aka Elias Bouchard is a Bastard but he is far from the only one, M/M, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), canon-typical content ahoy, cuz it's not a focus. Just Martin pining for Jon and Jon musing on Gerard.)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:49:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29921292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Surgeworks/pseuds/Surgeworks
Summary: Series of statements read by various Archival assistants concerning both curious artifacts and dangerous individuals.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: Genesis [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2200389
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Desync

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warnings include: nyctophobia, claustrophobia, immolation, vertigo, gore/body horror & death, chionophobia/cryophobia, isolation, drowning, unreality/twisted reality, sickness/cancer.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place between MAGs 85 and 86, circa February 19th-20th.

_[CLICK]_

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Scott Walsh, regarding an impostor and the death of a friend. Original statement given August 21st, 2003. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims in his personal investigative capacity. (Sigh)

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I had been best friends with Mitchell Foley since seventh year. We had the kind of bond that was tighter than a knot and stronger than steel. We did everything together and saw each other regularly even outside of classes all the way up into university. There's just no overselling that we honestly loved each other like brothers. Well...mostly.

I've never been much for dating, but Mitch, well, he loved being the player. Not that he was a bastard about it, he was just popular with girls, and he knew it. Every once in a while a steady girl came along for a few weeks, but never more than a couple months before they broke up amicably. I don't remember having to support him through any bad breakups, even though I'd gladly have consoled him. The worst if ever got was just needing a few drinks, and he'd be fine. I think it was the fact that when he got together with someone, both he and she knew it wasn't real, and more because they wanted to have fun...and somehow that always worked out for them. Lucky bastard.

But eventually, there came a time where this wasn't the case. When Sam came along.

Sam, short for 'Samantha', I guess, was the latest of Mitch's loves, and while he never went head over heels, never went and said she was the most enthralling woman in the world or anything, I could tell that this was something else. He tended to devote more time to her than he ever had to his other girlfriends, and there were a lot of times he canceled on our plans because he wanted to take Sam somewhere. I didn't really mind, not at first. I mean, I was annoyed a few times, but it wasn't like I felt threatened. This was Mitch, and I was me, and we were always each other's greatest concern. He was allowed to have time for a nice girl.

I say 'nice' because I did see Sam a few times when I crossed paths with her around town with him. She had to have had a great personality, because if you asked me, she wasn't necessarily ugly, or even plain, but she was way less looks-wise than most of the other girls I'd seen Mitch go for. She wasn't afraid to chat with me, and she did have a really friendly personality and a bright smile. So I didn't bear her any ill will.

But...I _was_ jealous. It went on for way longer than I expected it to, and, well...I'd been jealous of every girlfriend Mitch had ever had, to be honest. He's never looked at me quite the same way I look at him, is all, and I've always been able to handle it. I've never been so upset about it that I wanted him to break up or get his heart broken or even that I just disliked his girl of choice. I wanted him to be happy, and that was usually enough to squash out my little petty feelings. And, being as used to suppressing those feelings as I was, it took me perhaps longer than it should have to get worried about Mitch.

I noticed that I wasn't seeing him around as often as much. He wasn't making nearly as much time for me as he could have, and I took that gracefully. Right up until he decided to move to help her build her home. Mitch had done some construction work before, so it wasn't the nature of the work that got to me, but I didn't like it. Sam was moving away, and that meant--even though he lived on campus with me at the time--that he might be at risk of moving away, too. I didn't like that, in fact I downright hated it. That was when I thought Sam might really be taking him away from me.

I know, that's an awful, jealous, petty way to put it. But without me so much as being able to take him aside and advise him against it, he was leaving. He told me it was alright, that we'd still have our phones and we could call each other every day if we liked. And that was true, or at least I thought it was. But I still didn't want him to go. What was I supposed to do without him? Scott Walsh without Mitch Foley just didn't make sense. And my bitterness against Sam grew every time he talked about her, mentioned something she'd done or said or worn, talked about what he'd be doing with her this weekend...

So, he left. And we traded numbers and kept in contact, for six months. Six months, our only connection was over telephone wires and cell towers. For six months, I never saw his face. And I wanted to, so badly. He'd switched to online classes, and even though he always said he was coming back to campus, and eventually coming back to me, construction on the house had to have been done. Everything always seemed to be undergoing some unexpected delay when I asked about their progress--some furniture broken, or a wall knocked out, or they had to spray for bugs, or they were dealing with some financial issues... But the thing that really put me out wasn't that he wouldn't come back to me, it was that I couldn't go see him.

Whenever I brought it up, I was hastily assured that now was a really bad time for me to come over, that it'd happen someday soon but just not right now, and that the place was a mess and there was nowhere for me to sleep. Even just for an afternoon visit, I asked? No time to go to the skating rink, or an arcade, or just to get drinks and dinner? Sam could come, couldn't she? But it was just never a good time.

For the record, I didn't suspect Mitch to be the type to get into unhealthy relationships with controlling girls anymore than I suspected him to be the settling-down type, but I always wondered. All of this had started when Sam came along, could it be possible she was trying to keep him away from me, keep him from _anyone_ else, in fact? I couldn't figure out how to breach that subject with him. An angry, hateful part of me wanted it to be true. Not that I wanted him to suffer or be abused by some control freak woman. I just wanted it to be true that he was trapped and cut off like I was, so that it wouldn't be true that he'd chose someone else over me for good and left me to drift off, unimportant and forgotten.

Then, six months after he first left, things changed again. I called, bitter and miserable but masking it well, and got the shock of a lifetime when, out of habit, I asked about visiting and he said yes, I could totally visit soon. The house was all done, all the paperwork sorted out, all the furniture brought in, I asked? All taken care of, he said. He wanted me to come over and see the house. And he wanted me to spend the night, said it had been so long since he'd seen his bro. And I...I was thrilled. I didn't tell him, but I was actually ready to cry. So it wasn't over after all. He hadn't just left me behind. We still had something irreplaceable, didn't we?

When I arrived at his house later that weekend, it was like he'd never left. He greeted me with this huge bear hug, and I was so happy. Just seeing him again made me feel like myself again. Funnily enough, Sam wasn't there. He said she'd taken a day out with her girls, and would be back tomorrow. 'Til then, I was free to spend the night, and he offered me a tour of the house. It was pretty bare-bones, but everything seemed alright. He and Sam had a room, and there was a second bedroom that I could stay in, a basement I was supposed to stay clear of since there was a lot of broken glass down there, and the house altogether looked nice. It wasn't very furnished for something that had taken six damn months, but I didn't care. I barely saw the house anyway, my eyes were on him most of the time. He was smiling so much. In fact, I noticed something off in it. By now I know it was affected, or maybe out of practice, like he didn't remember how to smile, but I didn't think anything of it at the time. The thing I was a lot more concerned with was his new earring in his left ear. I asked him about it, and he smiled even wider and said it was a gift from Sam. And then I thought, and then I realized that yeah, that earring was something I'd seen on her ages ago, hadn't I? And at this point, he just seemed to radiate so much happiness that I couldn't be mad at her anymore. In fact, I wanted to thank her for being so good to my best friend.

The tour wasn't one whole uninterrupted thing--he got a phone call in the middle of it that he rejected to keep his attention on me. And after it was done, we went out for drinks, and he got two calls before we were ready to go. Then he got a call at home. He assured me it wasn't Sam, and that he wasn't going to spend hours on the phone when he could be spending time with me. We had a great time that night, watched a movie, and eventually it was time for bed. And I went to my guest room and was happy to just go to bed. All that went wrong was that I woke up after midnight needing to piss.

So I crept around in the dark, looking for a bathroom that Mitch for some reason hadn't shown me. I only stopped next to Mitch's and Sam's room when I heard voices. Or, rather, just one voice. The wrong voice.

I hadn't spoken to Sam all that much or in a long while, but I knew her voice, and that was definitely her voice. She has a clear and high voice, slightly nasally, not at all similar to Mitch's deep voice. I remember being confused, because Sam wasn't supposed to be back yet, was she? There was light coming from the crack under the door, and I looked through the keyhole.

I could see Mitch, and he was on the phone with whoever had been calling him all damn day. It was Mitch...but he was speaking in Sam's voice. I know he was, because I could read the words I was hearing on his lips and in his body language. He was talking with someone he...or she...called 'Mom'. Telling her not to worry, that she was fine and didn't need anyone to come over. Mitch doesn't have a mom, he's lived with his single father since he was a kid. I sat there dumbfounded for way too long before my brain caught up with my eyes and ears and I realized I was terrified.

There was a moment where he walked toward the door and I bolted as quietly as I could. I didn't know where I was going, fumbling around an unfamiliar house, but I ended up at the door to the basement, and I could hear him coming, so I yanked it open and shut it tight, still trying to be quiet. I heard him pass the door, and then I heard him going back up the stairs. I breathed again, and then...I turned around. There were stairs behind me, and I could go down them. Was it really just broken glass down here? What was it that the thing I thought was Mitch didn't want me to see?

It looked like nothing out of the ordinary at first. There was a pool table down there, so I had the inkling that the fake Mitch might've wanted to turn it into a game room. I might not have even noticed something was wrong if I wasn't both scared and curious. I haven't seen a huge amount of pool tables, so I'd guess that most of them don't have lids that are hinged on one side. When I noticed that, I knew I had to open it.

It was Mitch, laid in the wooden tub forming the table. It was hard to tell, because it was so rotted, but I'm sure it was him, same face shape and build, and he was wearing clothes I recognized. The weird thing was, there was no smell. Corpses are supposed to stink as they rot, aren't they? And there were no bugs. I reached out to touch what had once been a face, dead layers of decaying flesh sitting there in a shape that looked as though a bad artist with a bad memory had tried to draw my best friend. I touched it, and it pressed inward, fell inward. There was nothing under the flesh of the face, no skull or brain. The whole head started to cave in, and I started to cry, and I think I also pissed myself. There was one thing I noticed before I went back up the stairs with only the terror of whatever was on the other side of the basement door to keep me from tearing out of there both quickly and loudly. It was the one part of his body I could see that wasn't rotted, and in fact it was in perfect condition. It was his left ear, with no earring in it.

I didn't hear anyone outside, but I stayed in that basement for hours with the corpse of my best friend. If I could just get to my phone, back in the guest room... Eventually I risked it and opened the door, and nothing stopped me as I crept back up to my room and called the police.

When I told them there was a corpse in this person's basement, they sent a squad over immediately, but the fake Mitch saw the sirens and went out the back door. Officers saw him and went after him, but as far as I've been able to find, he was never caught. The body in the basement was definitely discovered, but they haven't been able to positively identify it. I haven't had the strength to tell Mitch's dad the truth, and I doubt the police have been very forthcoming. He just believes his son's missing.

I've had fantasies of kissing Mitch for years, but now the very thought repulses me. Whatever had taken him had started with his voice, and hadn't wanted to see me until it was finished stealing the rest of him. Sam obviously was never going to come back to that house, and for all I knew she'd been dead for ages. If I had stayed there, if I had stayed in that house with the fake Mitch...what was he planning? Would I have had my voice stolen, and ended up stuffed in the basement, too?

I've moved, but I'm still paranoid. If he finds me again...he knows I know his secret, now. Why didn't I just pretend everything was fine? Why didn't I just split the next day and pretend it was never a good time to see him when he called?

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Hmm. Judging by the statement summary, I was expecting the Not-Them. Certainly the modus operandi of this 'Sam' fits the Not-Them suitably enough, but the actual execution is too different. From what I know, the Not-Them never kept any bodies, simply over-writing the people it killed, and if I'm reading this follow-up material right, the entity's appearance isn't noted to have changed by the accounts of either Scott Walsh or anyone else who claimed to have known Mitchell Foley. There's some mentions of furniture being moved around, but nothing about a web-patterned table, which I'd have thought would've cropped up given that this statement's events would've happened in early 2003 and the Not-Them was bound by Adelard Dekker in 2001.

There's also the fact that it hops from person to person, and if Scott Walsh's testimony is to be believed, its powers aren't as polished. The theft of the victim's appearance would have to be out of sync with the theft of their voice, which would seem to justify the creature's efforts to remain audibly present but unseen for a long time, and why it kept the body of Mitch Foley around. While it does alarm me that there is potentially another monster running around stealing people's identities and entire lives, I will admit some relief that should it ever target someone I know, I might be able to tell.

 _(sigh)_ I...I'm sorry, Sasha.

I wonder how Tim and Martin are doing. There's been remarkably little police activity in the area. I want to tell them the truth. I mean, I'm sure Tim's already worked it out, and Martin, well...he'd never believe I'd kill anyone. I don't think. They can't honestly think I killed Sasha.

But sometimes I feel like I did, letting that _thing_ crawl around with her name while I never noticed.

_[CLICK]_


	2. Nievoldhagen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place between MAGs 86 and 87.

_[CLICK]_

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement of Johanne Gregori, regarding an exploratory probe into an abandoned village in the Saxony-Anhalt state. Original statement given September 19th, 1990. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims...despite his better judgement.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I am an explorer at heart. I have never had much fear of the unknown, and I have always loved the thrill of discovering something unique or valuable. It hasn't been the most lucrative hobby of my life, but it's the one I've enjoyed by far the most. I have good friends around the military circles who have been able to hook me up with both historical sites and some equipment on occasion, and I'm proud to say that I am good enough that I was eventually sought out for a job. Not that I don't wish with every fiber of my being that I hadn't taken it.

It was a rich man named Maxwell Rayner who found me. Told me he'd heard that I was into exploring abandoned places and finding nice things. I told him I was, and when he offered me a chunk of money big enough to buy the latest discreet gear and then some, I told him it didn't matter what job he did, I'd do it better than anyone else could. He was very happy to hear that, and told me he'd be getting in contact with me as soon as he found a suitable companion to accompany me. I was a bit sore that I apparently wasn't trusted to do it on my own, but I brightened up when he came calling a few days later and told me who my partner would be. As it happened, it was my friend Kaz.

Well, I say 'friend'. Kaz and I had crossed paths a few times, because he happened to have a bit of an exploratory streak himself, albeit he was way more into urban legends. He'd spent the months since I'd last seen him off traveling, looking for some vanishing church or other. We didn't know each other _that_ well, but we got along, and I was glad it was him that was going along with me rather than a complete stranger.

The job, according to Rayner, was to go and explore an abandoned village called Nievoldhagen. Now, I've done my research on Nievoldhagen. There's nothing out there, it's not even a ghost town. Just the foundation wall of an old church and a spring. There's a legend about it, but it's nothing all that entertaining. Rayner insisted, though, that there was more. He had it on good info, he said, that the ruins of the church there actually held a door to intact tunnels underneath the village. I was pretty skeptical, even when he said there was the possibility of finding treasure down there, or old historical relics that could be sold for high prices. But I was getting paid to go do it, so I agreed to go out there and, should I find anything of note, bring it back to him.

So we packed up our cameras and our equipment and headed out. Nievoldhagen is under the care of the German forestry services, but ducking around them was easy enough. We started out an hour before dusk, just as we'd been told, and although it took a while, we managed to find the village just as the sun was setting, which is where the first odd bit happened.

We heard a church bell. Both of us, loud and clear. We jumped a mile each and looked around, then looked at each other. We both agreed that we'd heard that and should probably turn out cameras on. While we followed the sound in the direction it had come from, I started thinking about the legend of Nievoldhagen. Three men from neighboring villages were crossing the area when their pigs found the abandoned village's church bell, and they decided the one who got it back the fastest got to keep it for their village. But it's just an old story, and there's no evidence there's ever been any church bell, any more than there's ever been an entire church.

Pretty soon, we found it. It...well, it wasn't much, though it did have that air of mystery and wonder to it. The first thing we found was a well, which struck me as odd, because there wasn't supposed to be one out here. Kaz and I took a look down it, and found nothing but darkness. We went on a little ways and found the church ruins, sitting there. Stonehenge is a more impressive site, and to be honest I've never thought much of Stonehenge. It's just a wall of rocks with a couple pillars and a wooden cross at one end of it. We crunched through the leaves, looking around for something we were supposed to find. Kaz reminded me that an old key and a coin from 1554 had been found here, so it wasn't totally hopeless. We started with the church site and started raking away the leaves in the center of the ruins.

We didn't find any old keys or coins, but we did find a trapdoor. Rayner had been telling the truth.

We left the door open as we descended so that light would flood into the place below. And what a place it was. It was a series of tunnels, cut neatly into the rock under the soil. Everything was dusty and bare, and although it was summer and the air was dry down here, it still felt very cold. We started walking, recording with our cameras and chatting back and forth about what we could be traveling through and what we might find down here. I had practical guesses; wind tunnels, probably, or perhaps the entire town had been moved underground to avoid a war, a rebellion, or persecution. Kaz's ideas were wilder; he thought maybe the villagers hadn't made these tunnels, and that they'd perhaps fled what they found here. I rolled my eyes. He was rather excited at the idea of finding ghosts down here. Me, not so much. I do love a good bit of spooky atmosphere, but haunted sites aren't my thing, and I don't really believe in ghosts to begin with. Or, at least, I didn't.

The place wasn't linear; there were tunnels intersecting with ours, some round instead of square, some wide and some narrow, and there were plenty of forks and bends. There were rooms here and there, with a chair in one or a busted gas lantern in another. I had some hope that maybe my underground village theory was correct when we found a blackboard in one, but there just weren't enough signs of human life to say for sure. The whole place didn't seem to make sense functionally or directionally.

There were unsettling noises. At first I thought I was imagining it, but Kaz definitely heard a thunk against a wall one time and said as much. Scrapes and scratches started to pick up. I practiced my breathing and told myself it was nothing. But that was getting harder to believe the further in we went, and the darker it got as the light from the open trapdoor faded with distance. We turned on our torches pretty quickly. We found more light maybe a half hour in, coming from a tunnel branching off of the one we were traveling down. It turned out to be the bottom of the well, where moonlight was streaming in. We passed it and kept moving. I kind of wanted to see if we couldn't climb out of the place from there when we passed it, to be honest. I didn't want to delve deeper into the dim lighting. The sounds were getting worse, and Kaz had the audacity to call out to any spirits who were haunting the place. I elbowed him for that. Was he hearing the whispering, too? The footsteps behind us when both of us were stopped?

We continued to wander, and I admit that I was putting on a bit of bravado when Kaz asked me if I knew the way back. Of course I did, I'm an explorer, I have a great sense of direction. And to be fair, it was true. And I was fairly sure it wouldn't be trouble to finally go back once we got tired of strolling around here and decided there was nothing left to find. There was just that nagging fear, that apprehension.

I don't know how long we were down there for, but our torches started to run low on batteries. I didn't like the way the darkness fell when they finally died, but I remember scrambling to get a new set in without dropping them in the water that was puddling around our shoes. Once they were in, I turned it on, and we continued. Maybe an hour and a half in, we finally reached a dead end, and had to turn around and go back. Our torches died on the way, and we were out of the right size batteries. Thankfully, I'd invested in some proper high-tech gear--I had a Handycam with night vision. I flicked it on, then raised it back up to my head, and peered down the tunnel ahead of us. Just as I did, I heard something behind me, and turned around.

This time it wasn't nothing. The first thing I saw was two eyes glowing bright green in the night vision's light. Then a wide grin came into view. The footsteps got louder, closer, and I saw a huge hunched figure, so dark it might've had ink for skin, crawling towards me on hands and feet.

I screamed, turned around, and ran. I called for Kaz to run, and he was following me asking what the hell I was running from. I heard footfalls behind me, and didn't know if it was the creature, or Kaz, or both. I heard screams. I just ran, sprinting my way down tunnel after tunnel, skidding and bouncing off the walls when I hit a bend. I didn't know where I was going, and the urge to flee had driven direction out of my mind, but somehow, I found it. I found the stairs leading back up. I saw them, saw moonlight streaming down them, and ran up them as fast as I could. I tripped on my way up, busted my lip wide open and chipped a tooth, but kept going, and then slammed the trapdoor closed and locked it, and held it shut.

And I made a very cowardly decision. I regret it. I shouldn't have, but the thought occurred to me that I needed to go back for Kaz. I couldn't leave him there. There was no resistance against the trapdoor. I had no idea how long I had been left alone for, but if the monster wasn't after me, then it was after him. He was in trouble, and he needed help and I...I wasn't going back. I was too scared. Did my own skin matter to me more than he did? ...Yes, it did. I'm a coward and my friend is dead, because I threw him to the creature in the dark.

Everything was silent in the ruins of the church. There was a slight breeze making the leaves rustle together, putting me on edge, but that soon stilled. I could hear only my own heavy breathing. I don't know how long I stayed there with my palms pressed against the trap door, but eventually I got up, and staggered back, moving quickly. I'd get a search party rounded up for Kaz. They'd find him tomorrow morning, surely, holed up in the tunnels where the monster couldn't reach. He'd be okay. I could do him the best favor by running away, couldn't I? I could get help.

I started to leave the village, but I didn't get very far before something made me stop. It wasn't just a scream, it was a howl. An awful, hideous, screeching sound that couldn't come from anything human. I turned back towards where the sound had come from. It was the well, sitting there in the moonlight ringed by its little wall. Inky black smoke was drifting up out of it. The sound of flesh hitting stone at a rapid pace reached me, and a black, clawed hand reached up over the rim of the wall. I watched in horror as the pitch black monster from below crawled up out of the well. Its mouth full of teeth was wide in its scream, and its eyes glowed in the moonlight just as they had in the night vision of my camcorder. It was the source of the black smoke, unfurling from its body. I turned heel and ran. I ran, and I ran, and I didn't stop until I was back in my car, and I drove away as fast as I could, nearly crashing several times. I did not make contact with Maxwell Rayner again, and I have not seen or heard from Kaz since.

I am here because I have lived with this trauma and guilt for this long. But no more.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends. (deep breath in)

**GEORGIE**

Blimey, he killed himself?

**ARCHIVIST**

_Daugh!_ Georgie--! Don't sneak up on me like that!

**GEORGIE:**

Sorry. I've been here for a while, tried to get your attention, but you can get pretty into these things, so I just figured I'd talk to you when you were done.

**ARCHIVIST**

Wha--? _(confused)_ You did? I...I didn't notice you at all.

**GEORGIE:**

Yeah, I know, and you wonder why I'm concerned about you obsessing over these statement things. I swear, it's a good thing you don't text and drive. The way you glue your attention to exactly one thing to the exclusion of all else...

**ARCHIVIST**

_(perturbed)_ I...no, no, you're right. That's enough for today, I think I'll stop.

**GEORGIE:**

...That's a nice change. So, the guy offed himself?

**ARCHIVIST**

Ah, there's follow-up attached, so give me a second... Yes, it looks like Johanne Gregory's death was ruled a suicide just a few days after this statement came to light. No signs of the other explorer 'Kaz', but knowing Rayner, I'd put money on him being dead or worse.

**GEORGIE:**

You know, you're going to have to tell me what's going on eventually. I know you met up with someone. I'm not afraid to institutionalize you. All of this is leading nowhere good.

**ARCHIVIST**

_(irritated)_ Georgie, don't you have a podcast to go set up?

**GEORGIE:**

Maybe I do. I think I'll look into German forests next, what do you think?

_(sound of a door closing rather harder than necessary)_

**ARCHIVIST**

_(under his breath)_ I think I appreciate the concern, Georgie, but I'd rather vanish into thin air than drag you into this any further than you already are. Melanie's already at the Institute thanks to me. You can still get out, though. Not like us.

_[CLICK]_


	3. Coffee Shop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place between MAGS 100 and 102.
> 
> Content warning for sexual assault.

_[CLICK]_

(sound of a door opening)

**MELANIE**

Oh, sorry, were you about to get started? ...Martin?

**MARTIN**

I... Yeah, yeah, I guess I was, it's just... D'you see this?

**MELANIE**

Yeah, it's torn. Not able to find the other half?

**MARTIN**

So far, no, I haven't. But...well, this is just bizarre. In all my time of working here, I don't think I've ever seen a statement ripped like this.

**MELANIE**

Is that bad?

**MARTIN**

I don't know. For all Gertrude's senile idea of organization, I've never seen a statement actually damaged. It's just one of those things that...it hits a little wrong, you know? 'Course, can't prove she did this one.

**MELANIE**

Well, if it's so rare, that'll at least make it easier to find the other piece. I'll let you know if I see it.

**MARTIN**

Yeah, thanks.

[LONG SILENCE]

**MELANIE**

You're looking at me like you want to ask me something, you know.

**MARTIN**

Well, I... Okay, fine. I was going to ask if you've heard from Jon lately. Since he's still not at the Institute, and you're his 'inside source' and all. He's the one who does this for his living, after all.

**MELANIE**

_(sound somewhere between a derisive snort and a noise of pity)_ You don't have to pretend you're just put out by doing the statements, you know. We can all tell you're worried about him, and it's okay to be. Maybe with a bit less _gusto_ , of course, but--

**MARTIN**

Yeah, yeah, I get it. Just...any news?

**MELANIE**

No, haven't heard from him for a couple of weeks.

**MARTIN**

_(spluttering) Weeks?!_

**MELANIE**

Well, yeah, I mean it's not like we keep in constant contact, I'm sure he's just--

**MARTIN**

When he last popped up after being gone for ages, his hand looked like he'd stuck it into a furnace! Who's to say he won't turn up with his whole body looking like that next time!

**MELANIE**

Martin, really, relax. Jon's stayed alive this long. I'm sure he's just holed up somewhere inhaling more dusty old statements or poring over the internet for whatever it is he's trying to stop. Seriously, you could bottle that energy up a bit. It's not like there's a reward for fretting, especially over a guy like him.

**MARTIN**

_(sharp intake of breath, moment of silence)_ No, no I guess not. Could worry about Tim, if I wanted to get cursed at, or you, if I wanted snide remarks. I'd worry about Basira, but hey, whaddya know, she seems to be holding up just fine!

**MELANIE**

_(somewhat longer silence; short intakes of breath, a la 'wanting to say something')_ ...Alright. Alright, that's my fault. That's what I get for hitting below the belt. Sorry. I'll...I'll leave you to your statement now, then.

[SOUND OF DOOR CLOSING]

[SOUND OF SOMETHING HARD DROPPING ONTO A TABLE]

**MARTIN**

_(voice much closer to the tape recorder, slightly muffled against wood)_ I shouldn't have said that. Melanie at least, I can talk to, even if it's like walking around broken glass. I'll go apologize later. For now, though...

[SOUND OF PAPER BEING SHUFFLED]

Statement of Samuel Locane, regarding a violent altercation behind a cafe. Original statement given August 28th, 2005. Audio recording by Martin Blackwood, Archival Assistant at the Magnus Institute.

**MARTIN (STATEMENT)**

This happened to me just last month, and it concerns a person who's now dead, or worse. I was sitting in the coffee shop over on High Street just eating a bagel and drinking on my lunch break, since I hadn't had anything to eat that day. I wasn't in much of a rush, so I had a bit of time to look around and observe the things around me, which...I mean, isn't supernatural on its own, I know. The guy this concerns...one of them, anyway...he was the barista there. Or at least he was that day; I've been to that coffee shop loads of times, and I only ever saw him working there that day, and haven't been able to find out what happened to him since.

His name tag read "Zak", and he had dark hair in a short cut, and he had the kind of frame and face that the high school girls giggle over, and he had an earring and a shiny black cross hanging against his chest from a necklace. It wasn't too hard to justify staring at him, honestly, because of the way he behaved. He seemed to be mute, because he never spoke, or even so much as opened his mouth, even when he was spoken to by his customers or coworkers, and took all the orders by writing them down and passing them back. And he was nervous as hell. I remember glancing his way every few seconds, and then just outright staring because he didn't seem to notice me anyway. He would do things that he was technically supposed to do, like washing out cups or stirring the coffee or pouring it out, for way too long. I could tell it was because he was watching someone, and if it had been me, I'd have been real creeped out. As it stands though, I think the guy's a hero.

The guy he was watching, I eventually realized, was some loner drinking his own coffee off to the side. He'd been there before I got in, and he didn't seem to be talking to anyone or concerned with too much except his drink. He was blond, and a little bit taller than me, and I could tell he needed the coffee, because he looked tired. Eyes real dilated and lids drooping, definitely in need of a good night's rest, but decently good-looking otherwise. Not too young, maybe a university student, just a little younger than me, I'd say. For a while, I just sat there munching my bagel and sipping my espresso, trying to silently work out the drama here with the boring guy who was so fascinating to the mute barista.

When I first started paying attention to where the blond guy was looking, I thought I had it worked out, you see. Figured Zak was jealous. Blond guy with the coffee, he wasn't so idle as I thought at first, and when I finally followed his own gaze, I found it on a _really_ pretty girl. She was giving him the eyes, and he was giving her the eyes back, and after a while the little smiles between them got to a point where I wondered why more people weren't trying to get out from between them. They were across the room from one another, so they weren't really able to talk, but I know what it means when a girl looks at a guy and plays with her hair. I glanced back at Zak, and he had a look on his face like he was holding back murder. I smiled to myself. Poor guy with the coffee shop blues.

Just as I was finishing off my lunch, the pretty girl jerks her head in the direction of the south wall. Took me a minute to work out the meaning behind that one, and then I realized there was an alleyway behind the cafe. So, yeah, these two were about to take the 'eye' out of their 'eyefucking'. I wanted to laugh until I saw the look on Zak's face again. I bit my lip, and wondered if maybe Zak wasn't just jealous of his crush's attentions, but was struggling with a cheating girlfriend. And if that was the case, I felt for the dude, that had to have been awful. Imagine flirting with another man right in front of your boyfriend at his workplace, and he can't do anything because he can't even speak. Real dirty way to treat someone.

Regardless of what the truth was, though, I saw her get up and sling her bag over her shoulder and stride on out the door, giving the blond guy this glowing smile as she walked by, heels clacking on the floor. She turned a right as soon as she got out the door, which meant she was headed behind the cafe. Only a couple of seconds later, the blond guy disposed of his coffee cup, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and left to follow her. My eyes flashed to poor Zak, who...well, he didn't just look angry now, he looked scared. He put down the cup he was filling, with the customer standing right there, and moved out of the den to the back of the shop over the lady's protests.

At this point, I knew something was going to go bad. I didn't know who any of these three people were, but from the short time I'd been watching them, I knew two things: Zak might try and make this physical, and I didn't know how much a chance he had of winning, and two, Zak wouldn't be able to call for help if things _did_ take a turn for the worst.

I didn't want to be a hero, I just didn't want to see anyone get hurt. So, trying to hurry while being inconspicuous, I discarded my cup and napkin and left the coffee shop, walking around behind the back to try and see what was going on. I knew as I heard the sounds of a struggle I had been right to.

When I say 'sounds', I mean muffled crying and screaming. I picked up my pace and turned the corner, it...it wasn't pretty. The blond guy, he had this chick up against the wall, one hand holding hers next to his waist, and the other pinning her other hand up near the wall. His mouth was pressed up tight against hers, and...Jesus, I'm sorry, but it had me frozen there for a second, it was so awful. Violence against women, it really bothers me, ya know? She had tears coming down her cheeks and she was crying against his mouth, and she couldn't get her head away.

I finally snapped out of it. I looked around for a weapon I could use, didn't find one, and resolved to use my fists. I shouted 'Hey', and got the guy's attention, and...eurgh.

He pried himself off of her. But, when his mouth disconnected from hers, there was this whole plume of smoke coming out, like you see when take the lid off of a pot of something boiling. Her tongue, the flesh in her mouth and on her lips, they were somehow burned, horribly burned. She immediately bent over, clutching her mouth in pain, and I just stood there in shock trying to process what I was seeing while the blond guy turned his head towards me, those half-lidded eyes taking me in while his mouth hung open crooked, as if he'd forgotten to close it, while steam rose off of bits of her burnt tongue clinging to his own. He took a single step towards me, and I was still frozen there, panicking, when the other guy came barreling in.

Zak, I mean. He came out of nowhere, swinging a goddamn crowbar. He tore out of the alley behind the blond guy and swung, and the crowbar connected with his head and bent it down and to the side, and I staggered back. By now the girl was running off, still holding her mouth, and now the burning mouth-man's attention was on Zak. He grabbed Zak's crowbar on the next swing, and he lunged at him, knocking him into a trash can, and--

**MARTIN**

Erm. Statement...doesn't end, I suppose, but that's all I've got. Given the way I found this, I obviously have no way of knowing if any follow-up has been done here.

[SHORT SILENCE]

This definitely doesn't help my worries about Jon coming back with fresh burns though, I suppose. Yeesh, that was ugly. It reminds me of...well, several other statements, and none of them any more pleasant than this one. As for this statement's, er, state, well. Have to wonder how it got like this. It _is_ making me think quite a bit about certain things.

I wonder if Elias is spying on me right now. Everything's so...so surreal nowadays. It was all fine, I was just tea guy doing follow-up, and then there were worms, a-and awful corridors, and murder...

Maybe Jon will get his own spying powers. If you can see me, Jon...be safe.

[ANOTHER, LENGTHIER SILENCE]

I should go try and apologize to Melanie, now. Maybe not over coffee, though.

_[CLICK]_


	4. Summer Break

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after MAG 111 but before MAG 114.

_[CLICK]_

**ARCHIVIST**

Alright. Now that I've come to understand the Entities, or the Powers, or whatever I should call them, this seemed like a good place to begin. I'm still committed first and foremost to stopping the Unknowing, but I've been talking with the others about potential rituals. 'Smirke's fourteen' as Gerry put it, does seem to be a fairly concise and understandable way of looking at it, and if monsters and avatars are adhering to it when attempting to cause the end of the world as we know it, we may as well use it. I've been bouncing ideas off of the others; apparently, the Stranger's ritual is unique in that the parts are flexible until it's actually underway, but in all others, the location seems to be of serious importance. This one concerns one we marked off as a possible European location. The Alps don't even crack the top ten tallest mountain ranges in the world, but it's the most extreme we can get while on this continent.

Ahem. Statement of Helena Rosten, regarding a vacation she took with friends to the Alps in the Zermatt. Original statement given September 10th, 2008. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

We were looking for one last big round of fun before the summer break ended. My university starts classes back up mid-August, and everyone was dreading getting back under their professors' thumbs and pens. I'm a social person, and I have a large and loose friend group, though I can't say I ever knew who Jagger was before this incident. I know he went to the university, but I'm not sure if he had any of the same classes as me, and I'm not sure which of my friends' friends he was friends with, you know? But it was never really an issue. He was a pretty social guy, too--big, very loud and energetic, kind of a 'popular jock' air to him, and friendly. When we were all having lunch at the mall one day, and he suggested we all go on a big trip, everyone was thrilled.

He said he always loved going to the Alps in Switzerland to ski, and that since he'd recently come into a windfall, he was willing to host us all as a party if we wanted to go. Well, obviously we all said yes. Soon as we all cleared it with our families, we were packing and ready to go. I joined Piper, Zoe, Tia, her boyfriend Korbin, Keith, Ewan, Phoebe, her boyfriend Benton, Axton, and Jagger at the airport, and we were off to Zermatt. It's the premiere skiing location of Switzerland, and maybe Europe, and Jagger told us we were in for a great time. We'd go skiing down the Klein Matterhorn, and skating on the Black Lake, and we'd camp out if he could find us a spot. He was also meeting a friend there, he said, who was coming down from a vacation in Norway and would be able to translate for us so we didn't have to hire one.

Mind, I'm not the best on planes--I'm afraid of heights, I've always hated them. The ride over was pretty uncomfortable, and I was swallowing a lot and staving off having to go sit in the bathroom so I was away from the windows. Jagger eventually noticed me, across the aisle and a few rows ahead, and got my attention, asking if I wanted to switch seats. It wasn't much, but it was thoughtful of him, and an aisle seat was much better than the window seat I'd had before. Mind, Jagger's a bit...well, not my type, I'm usually more into the quiet reserved ones, but his confidence and cheerfulness was rubbing off on me. And he did look cute in that beanie. I admit I started wondering if he was single while we were heading over to Germany.

Eventually we touched down, and Jagger got on his phone, and we milled around until he found the guy he was looking for. Some guy named Kaz, and they jogged up and hugged like old friends. When told where we were headed, he got us through the German authorities that much faster, and we were on our way. Some of the guys wanted to take a helicopter up to the resort, but it was stretching Jagger's budget, so we didn't do it. Zermatt's got a no-pollution rule, so we had to take taxis to get close enough and then get on the shuttle trains to our hotel. Once we were settled in, and got a good night's sleep, we all got into our winter skiing gear the next morning and went off. Jagger was going to supervise, but Kaz volunteered because he wanted Jagger to go set up a campsite for us to come back to.

It was honestly some of the most fun I've ever had. I'd never been skiing before, and it was a major thrill. I remember that Axton crashed into Tia on his snowboard and the two of them went rolling down one of the smaller slopes, and ended up laughing so hard. We must've been out there for the whole morning, and I was exhausted before we went out to the campsite for the ice skating.

Now that I'm back from this trip, and I've done my research, it's occurred to me that the Schwarzsee shouldn't have been frozen, even partially, this early. But it was, and it was beautiful. While I'd never skied before that day, I've done plenty of ice skating back home, so I was ready to show off. It's a beautiful place, mind you--the lake is ringed by the foothills of the surrounding mountains, which are covered in snow. Even with the sun still high at around 3:00, it was pretty cold, and some of our group opted to warm up in the tent rather than skate. Jagger told us to be careful, as the ice sheet was fine here but would probably thin out further out. I kept that in mind. So me, Korbin, Ewan, and Phoebe went skating, and I got the pleasure of running rings around them. I skated a little further out than them, since I wasn't scared, and...

I swear I only closed my eyes just for a moment. Just to feel the wind on my face while I slid out. It was only a few seconds, and I felt the wind rushing in my ears... And I opened my eyes. I didn't immediately realize that I was alone, except when I turned around to skate back towards the shoreline where our tents were. And that was when I noticed that I couldn't see the others. I just figured maybe they'd gotten tired and I was the last one out here, until I realized that I couldn't see the tent, either. I couldn't see the shoreline. In fact, I couldn't see anything but ice, anywhere that I looked. I whirled around, wondering if I'd just gotten turned around. This lake wasn't that huge, surely I couldn't have gotten completely lost out here? But everywhere I looked, there was only ice stretching on forever until it met the black sky. I freaked out, and I freaked out badly. I called for my friends, one by one, but none of them answered. There was no sound except the echo coming back to me. The world was way too wide, boundlessly stretching out around me, and yet there was no one and nothing in it but me.

That was when I took a second to realize that the sky wasn't black. Of course, it couldn't have been, it was only 4:00, the sun should've just been dipping down into the mountains by now. And I stopped, I got ahold of myself enough to slow down and look closely out at the surrounding wall of black. My eyes trailed upwards. The frozen lake underneath me, I saw, did have boundaries, in the form of massive mountains. They were nothing at all like the low ridges I remembered surrounding the lake only minutes ago, covered in snow and trees. The black rock stretched up from some point indefinitely far out and into the sky, straight upward. I had to crane my neck up to see any one peak, beyond which, so immeasurably far in the distance, there was blue sky waiting.

I felt a sick sense of vertigo. The mountains were the edge, the horizon, a limit to this horrifying empty world I suddenly found myself in, but I could scarcely comprehend them. I couldn't comprehend _anything_. If I looked skyward, my world had a limit ahead of me but no limit stretching up. If I looked out ahead, my world had a limit in the sky but no limits defining the endless stretch before me. I fell down onto my hands and knees on the ice, feeling a sick sense of vertigo. I couldn't handle it and I wanted to puke. I was lost out here. What on earth had happened, where the hell was I? Where were Phoebe and Korbin and Ewan and the others? Where was Jagger?

The spinning and stretching started to calm down when I closed my eyes and focused on nothing but the flat, detailed ice underneath me. That was certain. That was a floor under me, a definition to the world. And almost as soon as I realized that and started to take some comfort in it, I heard a loud crack.

I saw it at first, hairline and barely visible, but widening steadily with an accompaniment of ominous thuds and thunks seeming to come from under the top layer of ice. I scrambled to my feet. If I fell under the ice, would I die? I could swim, couldn't I? Or could I? I staggered back, looking around me. I tried to find some place to run, backing away in circles, but everywhere I looked, the cracks were blossoming like spiderwebs, and eventually I just picked a direction and ran. They caught up with me anyway, and I slammed my head on the edge of the ice as it gave way under me. I almost lost consciousness, but the terror kept me awake. It was brutally, bitterly, hideously cold, the water soaking through my heavy clothing so fast. I felt it weighing me down, dragging me, and I tried to tread water, hold my breath. My legs and feet were flailing underneath me, kicking at nothing, and I knew. I knew that there was nothing underneath me, forever. The dark water I was thrashing around in would stretch indefinably far beneath me, finding no lakebed, and with no fish or life at all underneath me. When I finally took in water and drowned, I'd sink forever.

I tried to get to an edge, swim to something I could grab onto, but the ice was collapsing around me in every direction. Every time I thought I could get close enough to an edge, it floated off onto the water, the safety of solidity stretching away from me as if repulsed by me, and nothing was holding my weight. I was going to drown out here.

I continued to thrash, coughing on water and ice as my waterlogged clothes slowly dragged me down under the surface, inexorably sucking me down deeper. I had fallen under the water completely, choking and panicking, and I couldn't see anything. The cold air hit my wrist where the glove didn't cover it one last time, and every part of me was under. I was a goner...and then something grabbed my wrist.

I was pulled gasping and spluttering out of the water. What happened in the next few minutes is a blur, not in the sense that I don't remember it well, but that I was barely able to comprehend what was going on. I remember someone beating on my back and getting me to cough out all the water I'd taken in, and I remembered seeing white and dark blue and black while water was still running down over my eyes. But I could breathe, and then more hands were grabbing onto me, pulling me upward, out.

The first hand to grab me had been Korbin, and Kaz was pulling me out as well. They were pulling me away from the water, and back towards the shoreline. To the tents that were there again.

I asked what had happened when we were back, and everyone told me that I had fallen under when the ice cracked under me. I got that part, but when they were telling me, I realized that no one else had experienced what I had. As far as anyone else had seen, there had been no endless ice or mountains higher than the sky. I had to have been stuck in that world for at least ten minutes, but I was the only one to remember it, and nobody else seemed wet or in shock like I was, so I didn't speak up about it. Everyone thought it was just an accident that had almost been tragic.

We decided to put an end to the activities for today, and it was Kaz to suggest sitting around a campfire and having fun, maybe roasting something. So we all set up a fire just outside the tent and gathered around it, me in a blanket because even hours later, the others were concerned I would get hypothermia. We started chatting, and...I don't know why I'm even telling you this, to be honest. It was a dumpster fire. Kaz innocently assumed, being unfamiliar with the rest of us, that Axton was Tia's girlfriend, and not Benton. Well, things got heated very quickly, and then dissolved into arguments. Someone accused Korbin of coming to my rescue a little too eagerly. I watched two relationships get destroyed that night over the campfire, and I was very happy to go to bed.

There was another day of vacation, in which everyone tried to have fun, but which I sat out of. Judging from the things I heard in the hotel that night...the others weren't in very good moods. Some of them seemed shaken. I find myself wondering if any of them had bizarre, too-big-too-empty world experiences like I did, or just had something happen to them that was off. Found myself asking Jagger, when he got back the latest of anyone, if Zermatt was haunted. He chuckled and said it was possible, as plenty of alpinists have fallen to their deaths there, but he's never let it bother him. So, yeah, I've had time to think if maybe I was haunted, or if Zermatt as a whole is just 'wrong'.

I don't want to say I didn't have fun. I did. And I think, those of us who didn't have explosive fights at least, we all had enough fun to want to go again. Maybe in a few years, for me, I'm not that keen on it. The plane ride back was awful, but I didn't dare close my eyes, not after what happened.

And now, here I am.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Well, that's disconcerting. With Michael Crew dead and the Mercers operating in the Americas, I had assumed Simon Fairchild was all we had to worry about when it came to the Vast. Helena Rosten doesn't seem to have realized that she had the experience she did, though judging by the details she drops here, sometimes without seeming to realize it, I'd bet that this 'Jagger' was an avatar. Perhaps we can trust him to stick to Switzerland where we can at least keep an eye on him, but that doesn't much comfort me. Rosten got some of the finer bits right--the Schwarzsee most definitely isn't supposed to be available to skate on in August, and there is definitely a history of deaths associated with the Matterhorn, the point that the Mountaineers' Cemetery is even a tourist attraction. And with the influx of tourists all year, every year, this avatar could make plenty of people go missing without them being noticed.

Then there's this 'Kaz' figure. This is the second statement I've read where such a man by that name is involved. I would think it would be made apparent if he was the same Kaz from Johanne Gregory's statement, since eighteen years span that statement and this one. It also doesn't pass me by that he's haunting the same general region and speaks the language, nor does it escape me that he's emerged unscathed from whatever attacked Helena, and even helped her get free. If he did indeed escape the tunnels underneath Nievoldhagen, I think we can safely say that this is someone to keep our eyes on.

...I still have Gerard's page, I could ask him about this. He and Dekker, they'd know of fringe activity, I would hope. ...But no. I'm not going to use him as a 'monster manual'. He deserves the rest he needs. I'll ask the others to look into the Alps. Maybe some of the Urals and the Scandinavian mountains too, while we're at it, since I've noted this 'Kaz' was visiting Norway.

 _(sigh)_ I should probably go help them get ready. There's preparations to make.

_[CLICK]_


	5. Scratching at the Walls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after 112 but before 116.

_[CLICK]_

**BASIRA**

Well. Back here again. Nothing on Justin Gough, so I figured, while we're in the downtime... This is another one Jon found stuffed in the storage unit in Hainault. Time to see what it's about, I guess. Might show it to Melanie, if the statement summary and date are anything to go by. Erm.

Statement of Sheeka Albert, regarding an investigation into a haunted house in. Original statement given January 1st, 2015. Basira Hussain recording.

**BASIRA (STATEMENT)**

I've been part of the Ectoplasmic Specter Probe since 2012. Ghosts have always fascinated me, and unlike a lot of the people out there running their various shows, I really believe that something exists alongside our reality. That ghosts and hauntings are real. And I finally got proof of it...I just wish I hadn't lost a friend to get it.

When I say 'proof', I mean, personally. I can't hand over video evidence, because guess what happens to be covered in static and undiscernible? Naturally, right?

Nothing about that day or that probe was typical, I can tell you that. For starters, we're usually checking out quiet places with storied histories. You know, the kinds of places that are established as haunted, if not famed for it. But this place we were checking out a couple weeks ago, well, it was just so normal as to be out of place. The little white house in the middle of Surrey's suburbia was practically brand new by UK standards. Its only occupant was the current resident and our contractor. And that was another thing, we actually had a contractor! Usually it's us having to ask permission to check places out, maybe slip in a bribe here or there so the authorities look the other way. But this guy actually wanted us here, had called for help, and was willing to pay us to get rid of the hostile entities in his house. Which was the final thing that stood out: ESP is usually about investigation, and although our leader Anya has taken a crack at exorcising spirits before and claims she's good at it, this was the first time we'd ever taken on a probe with the explicit intent of purging a spirit.

A few of the others, like Stefan and Juliette, asked if this meant that the mission was actually going to be a danger to them. Anya assured them it wouldn't be that dangerous as long as they followed her instructions. We met up with the contractor, Warren, outside the house on the day of the mission.

It was a fairly large house. I mean, it wasn't massive, but it was roomier than it probably needed to be for a single father and two kids. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, dining room, and laundry room, complete with attic and basement. The outside was white with a dark grey roofing, and the whole front of the house had that 'monster house' look where the windows and door are positioned so that the front just happens to look like a face. It was an overcast day, and I admit the place had a bit of a looming, spooky vibe to it. Warren was a middle-aged man, maybe closer to 30 than 50, with a shaved head and a tattoo of an eye on the back of his neck. He was very clear about what was going on in the house: everything from scratching at the walls to screaming, and bits of the house becoming 'unsafe to be in', forcing them to relocate. The apparition that appeared to have taken residence there, he said, had driven out his daughter and son, who were now living with his daughter's boyfriend while ESP handled the ghost.

Me, Trey, Stefan, Juliette, James, Heidi, Kaz, and Anya make up the team. The rules are clear when investigating any property: two people to a team, and no one goes into any room with a door alone or closes themselves in. The only people who don't have to follow these rules are Anya and Kaz, since they're the most experienced of the group. The two of them immediately called the basement and the attic, forbidding anyone to go into those rooms until they said so as they were designated the most dangerous by the contractor. Anya was going to head to the basement, but Kaz asked to take it instead, so they swapped. We were to keep in radio contact, and alert the others immediately if there was any ghostly activity, and especially if there was any hostility from the apparition.

Warren closed the front door on us once we were all in with our equipment, saying that 'she' wouldn't come out unless the doors were closed. I have to tell you, there was an immediate change in atmosphere when he did it. The whole foyer seemed a lot darker and a lot smaller, not to mention colder. We split up to handle our designated areas. James and Heidi would handle the kitchen and dining room, Trey and Stefan would handle the bedrooms on the first floor, and Juliette and I would take the bedrooms on the second floor. Juliette was recording, I was monitoring.

We don't trust either the cameras or the EMF devices too much. Sometimes they catch things, sometimes they don't, but it doesn't really indicate something solid if they don't. Anya says it's only some ghosts that show up on camera and make electromagnetic fields go nuts, and that not every ghost plays by the same rule, but we still like to have them just in case. Almost as soon as we split off from the group, though, I could sense something wrong. Besides the abnormal darkness in the house, and the stillness of the air, there was something... _under_. Under _me_. There was an odd give to the carpets and the floorboards underneath me, but also an odd resistance, too. It felt like something was pushing up against me with every step I took. As we moved through the house and began the ascent up the stairs, I heard it. The scratching, coming from the walls to one side. I looked at Juliette, and she looked at me, and we radioed over to tell the others what we'd heard. Stefan and Trey had also heard it, as had Anya. Juliette called out to any spirits that were in the location, asking for them to reveal something about themselves, but we got nothing, and the scratching went quiet once we were still. So we continued up the staircase, and it started up again.

It followed us down the hall, which was a lot longer than I thought it should have been. It was the inverse of the one downstairs, with the bedroom closer to the stairs and the bathroom further towards the far wall. The odd pushing against my feet continued to follow me up the stairs, along with the scratching at the walls. I told Juliette to stop for a moment and hold her breath, and I held mine as well, and we both realized we could hear breathing around us. Not like there was a person next to us inhaling and exhaling, but more like the house itself was sucking in and out. I admit that I was starting to get a little nervous. The most extreme stuff we'd had before coming here had always taken a while to accelerate, and this house was showing its stuff right off the bat. Warren hadn't mentioned any details about the apparition here or what it would look like, or any signature hauntings it preferred, so I didn't know what I was supposed to expect if the ghost wanted to attack me.

We walked down to the bathroom first, figuring it would be simpler, and I held the door open for her while she got a good look around the bathroom. That was where it all went wrong. The door swung back against me, hard, with much more strength than I'd have expected. I dropped my monitor in shock, and called out to her, and she swung around and tried to reach the door herself, but neither one of us was in time. It flung backward and threw me against the opposite wall, slamming shut with her inside. I could hear her calling for me, rattling the doorknob, and I stumbled to my feet and tried to prise it open, too. I thought, with the two of us working together, we should be able to get it open, and it looked for a moment like we could, with her pulling and me pushing and the crack between the door and the wall steadily widening centimeter by centimeter. That was when I heard the whole house around me shudder and groan, like it was inhaling sharply.

The hallway started to shrink. Not...not like something stretched shrinks. It shrank along the walls, getting narrower, like a tube that was being squeezed from either side. It wasn't a wide hallway to begin with, so I grabbed a recording device off the floor and told Juliette to hang on, that I'd get help. I ran for the stairs, but the hallway was shrinking too quickly. I got caught, sidling and almost being squeezed in, when the door to the bedroom flung open. I knew it was a trap, and it was stupid to go in, but I didn't have another choice, or the hallway was going to crush me. I ran inside, and sure enough, it slammed shut and locked behind me when I did, and things seemed to relax around me, like an exhalation. Everything got very quiet, and the sounds of Juliette banging on the bathroom door faded to nothing. It wasn't anything special, as far as bedrooms go--a single bed, a ceiling fan, a bedside table and lamp, a window with the blinds drawn, and a closet. My eye was immediately drawn to the closet door, which creaked open, inviting me.

There was no way I was going in there. I couldn't see the inside, covered in darkness as it was, but I knew I'd get shut in the moment I went in there. And I wanted to go in there. I mean, I didn't, it was obviously a maw waiting to snap shut on me, but I felt like I had to stop myself from going in. Like I was being pulled towards it and had to actively resist it. Things persisted like this for a minute or two in silence, a staring contest between me and an empty closet, until I heard a scream. It was Juliette, still in the bathroom. I ran for the door and started to try and yank it open, to no avail of course, while the house started to contract around me again. I was screaming for help, when all of a sudden, everything unwound. The door burst open and threw me on my back again, and I ran out into a full-size hallway again. Juliette smacked into the opposite wall at the same time, having just been let out of the bathroom. She ran towards me, almost bowled me over, and somehow our incoherent babbling coalesced into the obvious: we needed to get Anya. We started radioing in, trying to tell her what we'd found out and what had happened to us, when there was a loud _BANG_. It wasn't just a door slamming, it was a door slamming hard enough to shake the walls around it. We looked toward the source of the noise, and I feel like everyone in the house probably did. We stood frozen for a moment, before we heard another scream.

This one wasn't like our own screams of fear. This was a hideous, awful wail, some monstrous mix of terror and hate that no living human could've made. And it was coming from the basement. Juliette and I bolted, running down the stairs and trying to get to the basement door, crashing into Stefan and Trey as they made for the same place. The whole house was...I won't say it was moving around us, but I could hear the concrete and wood in the walls flexing, straining, with the same hate that was being howled out loud by whatever the thing in the basement was.

The sounds coming from in there were awful, and we tried the door, calling for Kaz. But we couldn't get the door open, not even the four of us working together. There were awful noises coming from down there, the shrieks and screams being punctuated by the sound of something being smashed against walls. There was silence for a moment, or I think there was--we were still calling out for Kaz--and then the screams started up again, and there was a shudder, this time as though something was pushing _out_ , and not crushing inward. There was light coming from under the door now.

Anya barreled down onto the stairwell leading to the basement door just as this happened. She said to move and let her try the door, but there was smoke coming from underneath it, now. I think she was going to try to pick the lock, but the handle was getting hot, and she couldn't manage it before she had to yank her hand away. There was fire on the other side of the door, and we could see it spilling under the door frame onto the wooden stairs.

We...we couldn't save him. Anya eventually dragged us away from the howling, burning basement and out of the house, having to kick the front door down to get out, because the fire was spreading beyond the basement and starting to spill up into the rest of the house. We barreled out onto the street, coughing on smoke, still hearing the screams, and we just bolted. We got in the van, and Stefan called the police to report the fire, and Anya got on the phone with Warren to try and let him know what was happening.

I've been having trouble sleeping since then, and I think all of us are traumatized. Kaz' body was never recovered from the house, they think...they think he was destroyed. Some sort of explosion occurred down there, we think he found a gas main and lit it up somehow, and there wasn't enough body left to...oh God...

Whatever he did down there, it worked. He's gone, but...so is the thing in the basement. The repairs must've been completed a lot faster than I thought, because Warren moved back in very quickly, and has reported that there's no paranormal activity occurring in the house anymore. He doesn't plan to get his daughter and son back in the house until he's 100% convinced it's safe, but he's thanked us sincerely for the help, and even sent us extra money to cover...to cover the funeral costs.

I only just yesterday worked up the courage to ask Juliette what she saw in the bathroom. Apparently, it started shrinking in on her as soon as she was locked in, to the point the shower walls cracked and the mirror broke into pieces. She says she saw a woman, some sort of filthy, skeletal stringy specter, dragging herself up out of the toilet and crawling for her. She thought she was going to die, but...then it turned around and zoomed right back down into the pipes. That happened just before the bathroom let her out and she met me in the hallway. I guess that was when Kaz got into the basement and got the ghost's attention.

I'm not sure if I'm going to continue hunting with ESP. I kind of feel like I have to, for Kaz, you know? He was always so interested in ghosts, seemed to really get the whole paranormal thing so much better than most of us. I just...don't want to go through something like that again.

**BASIRA**

Statement ends.

I... _(deep breath)_ Jesus, I couldn't have expected this. I remember this case. It was one of the Section 31 cases I got sent to check up on with Daisy. Shitty way to spend the Christmas holidays, but I remember it because despite reports that the house was in flames, it was perfectly fine by the time we got there. Ashes everywhere, but no actual fire, or even fire damage, even in the basement. There was no paranormal activity that we uncovered, either, or any sign of people around at all, so we were able to get back relatively quickly. And we definitely didn't find a body.

Anyway, I can confirm that this house, 321 Church Street in Surrey, is Karla Morgan's residence. Karla Morgan was an abuse case, her stepfather Warren took her away from her mother's house and had the mum committed to a mental institution. As far as I know, she's moved back into her father's house and there's been no reports since.

Well, let me see if there's any follow-up attached to this...

_[SOUND OF SHUFFLING PAPER]_

Hang on...this isn't...

_'The necklace described in this statement matches the description of the one stolen from Dekker by the gasping hospital patient that attacked him. I will be looking into this to see if this 'Zak' can be found and if I can't arrange a meeting with them. Perhaps there are more than one of these artifacts'._

Huh. This piece of post-statement is ripped, and that's all there is on it. It doesn't match the content in this statement, so I can only guess that it got mixed in with it by accident. Or perhaps on purpose, judging by how Gertrude Robinson is said to have run the Archives. That's odd.

I'll have to meet up with the others to discuss this. I'm sure Melanie and Jon will be very interested in this case, and might know what to make of the mismatched post-statement.

_[CLICK]_


	6. The House of Miracles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place early Season Four.

**ARCHIVIST**

Right. Statement of Irving Barrows, regarding his dyslexia and pilgrimage to the wilds of Germany. Original statement given August 8th, 2008. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I've struggled with dyslexia all my life. To this day, whenever I look at any writing of more than a few words' length, the letters start to flow and slide and the words appear scrambled and reversed. It's something that, as you can imagine, makes reading a Bible very hard. It certainly makes the idea of inheriting a pastorship and teaching in a church even harder. How are you supposed to read and interpret the word of God when you can't even crack the book open without starting to feel dizzy? It's been daunting at times, more than once I've felt like I couldn't do it.

But there was one book, in my youth, that I could read, and read perfectly, and it brought me such joy to be able to do so that I looked forward to going to church, just so that I could read it. I don't remember the title of it, but I do know it wasn't a standard Bible. It was sitting there in the slot on the back of the pew in front of me, and it seemed from the outside to be a bible, although looking back, it definitely could've been a hymnal, too, containing about equal parts chapter and verse as well as songs of praise. I never would have thought anything of it, except that the title didn't shift and blur when I looked at it. When I cracked it open during our Sunday reading of the verse, figuring no one cared what Bible I used since I couldn't read along anyway, I found to my astonishment that I _could_. Its contents weren't anything at all like the material our pastor was teaching, but just watching the words start out shifting and blurry and coalesce into a straight and coherent form, instead of the other way around, lit me up inside. I could read--this one book, I could read back to front if I wanted to.

I loved it so much that I ripped a page out and kept it. I know, I know, damaging and defacing a book is inexcusable, especially the word of our Lord. But I just couldn't help myself. Whenever my dyslexia would give me an especially hard time on any given day, I'd take the special page out and read it back to myself, and I'd feel better. I'd even feel like I could read a little better if I wanted to go back to other books, like it could almost cure me of my dyslexia for a little while. And whenever I read the page, I could feel the light of our Father God filling me, like a physical warmth.

Unfortunately, we moved a few years after my discovery of that book, and so changed churches as well, so I don't know what's happened to the book the page came from. I kept the page itself with me until 2005, when I was sent to America to help the relief effort for Hurricane Katrina, and the page blew away from me in the high winds. The loss was a blow to me, but being an adult by then, I was able to get past it. I'm telling you this so that you understand what compelled me to make the decisions I did at Inverstehen.

The rumor mill circulates. Spiritual sites have always fascinated me, of course, and I like to think that my pursuit of God has been appreciated by my fellow scholars. The relief effort had left me with a few new friends, such as Justin Garland and Ruth Paulson, who I invited to come back to London with me some day as thanks for showing me around America when it wasn't so flooded. Eventually, that came to be. It was in 2006 that I started hearing about a church in the wilds of Germany where the light of God was said to reside. A place, called the Kirche des Inverstehen, a place where miracles were said to occur in real life, in real time. I was studying spiritual sites as a whole, and I had a variety of places in mind to visit as soon as I was able, but I eventually narrowed it down to this one, and when Justin and Ruth visited me in 2008, they were agreed that checking this place out seemed like a cool idea.

There were all sorts of rumors about this place, you see--not just that it was supposedly abandoned, but that it apparently vanished and reappeared from time to time, or that one could hear the sound of a church bell around it even though it didn't have a bell tower. Convincing my parents to let me go wasn't easy in light of this, but eventually we agreed that we'd visit the Aachen Cathedral and look for Inverstehen on the way in and out. And back in May, we took our flight and began driving through the Saxony-Anhalt state.

Aachen is beautiful, by the way, very much a spiritual experience of its own, but the reason that I'm here giving this statement--when this Institute is generally looked upon with disdain by those of my church family who consider it secular and ignoble--is because we actually _did_ find Inverstehen. Not the way we intended to, of course, by asking locals and driving down the right roads, because no one seemed to have heard of the place. We were driving with the windows down on an empty road running through the woods when Justin, with his head out the window and enjoying the air, heard the church bell. I heard it too, despite the car radio being up and me focusing on driving, but I didn't say so at first. When he heard it again, he asked me to slow down and stop, and I did, and when we all heard it this time, a sort of excitement filled the car. The sound seemed to ring inside my head, calling me with gentle reverberations against the inside of my skull. I think the others felt the same way, too. Ruth was the first to suggest just getting out of the car and trekking into the woods to follow the sound, and Justin and I put up only half-hearted disagreements before giving in.

We got our holy books and prayer beads and put them in our bags, we got our cameras, we made sure we had our phones and I had the keys, and then we were off. The church bell continued to ring, drawing us deeper into the woods. It was a long and difficult walk, with the forest floor rising and falling around large roots and low-hanging branches forcing us to duck. But we eventually found it, right as the last ring sang out from the bell.

It was sitting there in a large clearing, the sun shining down on it in these beautiful rays, a large building of white with stained glass windows and a black spire. But it was the words that amazed me. They were all over the building's pillars, doors, and walls--some written in graphite or ink, some scratched into the wood and stone, words of faith and divinity. It would've been bizarre, but I was so caught up in the fact that I could _read_ them. I could read every word, without trouble. They all coalesced perfectly, and I didn't have to strain. There was no dizzyness. I didn't immediately register that the content of them was more than a little bizarre--not much coherency, and words like 'broken' and 'twist' here and there. I could only manage to intake that this was a place I could read, and therefore a place I belonged in. It filled me with that same urge to smile that that hymnal page from so long ago had. I could only think that it was ordained that I would come here, even over the protests of my friends who couldn't seem to read the writing.

We weren't alone out there, though. There were a few people in black church clothes milling about the pillars out front. One of them, a woman, noticed us strolling out of the woods and called us over. As far as I can tell, everything was normal, and I can remember _what_ I was told fine, and can repeat it to you here, but...whenever I try to remember the actual, exact words that she said to me, that anyone in the Kirche said to me, I have to fill in the gaps, because certain words are just absent from my memories. Trying to play them back in my head just replaces the missing word with a church bell.

After we confirmed that this was Invertehen, and after they confirmed that we were worshippers, we were given the opportunity to explore and to take pictures of this 'blessed historical site' to our hearts' content, and then...we were invited in, and asked if we wanted to partake in a...sermon? Ceremony? Yes, a ceremony. Well, of course, we did, with me being especially eager to. Justin and Ruth were a little more unsure of themselves, but still too caught up in the wonder of the place to say no.

We were taken inside, and it...it was beautiful, and unreal. The inside was so much bigger than the outside, the size of an entire chapel. It wasn't just the windows that were stained glass, it was the whole ceiling, which I could see light streaming down through, rendering lamps unnecessary. The images inside them were of bizarre but discernible shape, and they depicted people, some with halos and some without, and I figured that these were simply the artistic renditions of someone with a passion unmatched by their talent. There was a podium at the far end some hundred meters away, and between us and it, dozens of rows of empty pews all facing it, and behind them, closest to us, was an altar, complete with candelabra. The chairs around it were full of people, and there was a priest waiting in white robes for us.

We had questions of course, and hoped we weren't interrupting, but they waved us down. The only ones to find this church, the priest said, were God's chosen, always His Chosen, and this was where they met to try and ask Him for miracles by reciting and achieving a true understanding of his holy words. I asked what sort of miracles took place here, and they told me all kinds, but primarily healing, that of both the sick, the wounded, and the afflicted. Supposedly, he said, if a person had a true faith in God and trust in Him, and was one of the few who could truly translate his inscribed word, they would ascend to Heaven immediately. And, since no one was sick or wounded, he was offering us the chance to take part in such a ceremony.

We agreed, of course. Despite our various quiet misgivings, none of us was going to miss the chance to partake in something like this. I just assumed it was a fairly symbolic thing, like eating of 'the body and blood' of Christ in communion. If only we'd known he meant every word of what he said.

We sat down in empty chairs, and he apologized, saying that certain integral pieces of the ceremony were missing, and so they had to make do with substitutions. He referred specifically to the book in his hand and the rosary around his neck when saying this--which itself, mind you, is kind of a no-no in the Catholic faith. After he read some, and we recited some, I was selected to stand at the altar and wear the rosary while reading a specific passage from the holy book provided to me. And, I would have...but, well, I couldn't. Unlike the words on the walls outside, I couldn't read this book, which so far as I could tell, was just a normal Bible. The words weren't making sense, and the letters were bleeding together and flipping around and backwards, and it was giving me a headache just to try. The others present noticed my difficulties, and I had to explain that I have dyslexia, and that it might be best if someone performed this part of the ceremony in my place. Justin was the one that volunteered. I wish he hadn't. But looking back, I can't imagine there being any way that we'd have escaped one of us having to read the Word.

Justin took my place then, wearing the cross 'round his neck and holding the book in his hand, and began to read the passage selected to him. I wish I could remember what he'd said, but...just church bells in my head. And those were his last words.

As soon as the passage was completed, everything seemed to still. No one moved, and no one breathed, for just a moment. Then, things began to...shift. I thought I was getting some form of vertigo, or just about to faint because my dizziness was so bad. But I eventually realized that this wasn't in my head. The church was actually rotating. Gravity was still affecting me even as the room we were in spun, turning up into down. I realized this just in time and barely clung to my chair, which was still glued to the ground as though unaffected, and Ruth did the same. But Justin didn't have anything to hang onto. He fell from the floor down into the ceiling. And I do mean _into_ , not onto. He seemed... He seemed to fall in slow motion, but still too fast for me to reach out and grab, and by the time I was dangling, hands clinging to the legs of my chair, he had hit the stained glass ceiling, and been merged with it. I could see a new set of glass tiles, in his shape, bearing his colors and his face. After he became part of the glass, there was silence for a moment, before the rotating continued, turning everything right side up again.

Ruth and I were horrified, of course. When we fell out of our seats, confirming that gravity was right again, we scrambled to our feet and panicked. We weren't coherent, unable to figure out whether to call out for Justin, scream in fear, or attack the church leaders to demand him back. But the priest spoke, saying that Justin was worthy and that he had ascended, only to lament the use of the improper tools for the ceremony.

We ran. Ruth had to drag me along, since even though no one stopped us, I was slower than her because of what I was seeing. The words that had covered the lower outside the church, they were everywhere now. Etched into the walls and floor around us, all flowing across, all stretching out from an epicenter that was exactly where Justin had stood. I saw them covering the doors as we barreled through them, and the leaf-covered ground outside, as if they were bleeding off of the foundations. But we ran until we got to the car, and finally thought to take out our phones and do the obvious.

We did all the things you'd expect us to do, of course, called the police in a panic and told them our friend had been, ahem, kidnapped. They came out to the woods where we were, and searched the area. No church that they could find. No Justin, either. We gave them pictures we'd taken on the trip, selfies that contained his image, but they never found him, and we got called lunatics and druggies, naturally.

Justin Garland has not been listed as missing back home, because according to official records, he does not exist and never has. He's vanished, not just from the world but from our records of him. Ruth and I are the only ones who remember him. His parents and our friends and church families do not recall the Garlands ever having a son, just two daughters. I suppose that spares us the trouble of being noticed coming back home without one of the people we left with.

Ruth has returned to America. I...I'm trying to handle things. But it's hard.

I keep thinking of the words I saw, and of the book I used to read in my childhood. I keep thinking of the 'substitute' ritual props that they used, the book that had been so impossible for me to read. I keep wondering how things might've gone if I'd still had that book, or even just the one page. I'm quite sure the answer is that nothing good would've happened, and in fact it might've been worse. But I can't help feeling that they're connected, and that if I'd stolen the whole book instead of the one page...who knows what could've happened? Who knows if God really was in that church or not? What if I'm the only one able to read his true texts?

Would I have ascended to Heaven?

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Well, this is...quite surprising. There's follow-up attached to this one, so it seems Gertrude put as much effort into this one as she did the one regarding Nievoldhagen. Naturally, my first instinct is to assume they're connected, as they both involve abandoned churches in the forests of the same state of Germany. But I admit that doesn't mean much. Saxony-Anhalt is a very culturally-rich state, with innumerable important churches. It seems she was able to find plenty concerning 'Inverstehen' online, but nothing verifiable by scholarly sources. Apparently it's just a glorified urban legend.

She looked into the book that Irving Barrows mentions from his youth, suspecting that it may have been a Leitner, and I'm surprised to find that this venture went rather smoothly. Someone was able to contact him, and he gave the name and location of his childhood church, where the book was recovered safely. Apparently it now sits in Artifact Storage, and has been noted to be virtually unreadable by anyone here, inducing dizzyness and headaches when attempts are made. So far though, there have been no dangerous effects, although this comes with an admission of the fact that nobody was willing to test it too thoroughly.

I'm going to dig into this myself. If the implications given by Mr. Barrows are on the money, it would be the first I've heard of a location being directly linked to an artifact yet able to exist independent of it. That much is disconcerting. If followers of the Powers ever saw this statement, they might try to retrieve the book and unite it with the church. At the very least, though, the church is said to only appear every eight years. If that much is reliable, and I admit it isn't, then we'll know when to expect the next surge of church-related intrigue, given that another one wouldn't be due until 2024.

Something to look out for, at any rate.

_[CLICK]_


	7. White-Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after MAG 127.
> 
> Content warning for stalking, gore, suicide.

_[CLICK]_

**ARCHIVIST**

_What?!_ Are--are you serious?!

**BASIRA**

Dead serious.

**ARCHIVIST**

How does something go missing from Artifact Storage without anyone realizing?! I've worked here for years, and I've never even _heard_ of that happening!

**BASIRA**

What's the matter? Your powers of knowing everything slipping up?

**ARCHIVIST**

Oh, bite me, Basira, this is a big problem! Artifact Storage is dangerous, a-and carefully watched! A person stealing from there could achieve worlds of harm, and probably has already!

**BASIRA**

Alright, calm down. I spoke with Sonja and Rosie about this. It happened March of 2015, so by that timeframe, it could've been Gertrude. Knowing her, she would've had her uses, and while they probably weren't good, we at least know they wouldn't have been unleashed on the public at random, right?

**ARCHIVIST**

I...well, it helps to know when it happened. Of course, that just makes things worse in the end. Gertrude was supposedly working to destroy the Archives, wasn't she? God, all of the missing crap is probably down in those damn tunnels somewhere.

**BASIRA**

Why do you want that specific book, anyway? I didn't take you for a choir boy, or a fan of the Spiral.

**ARCHIVIST**

I wanted to test out my powers, and I wanted to learn about Inverstehen. I've been keeping track of statements happening in that area, and I'm not convinced I've learned everything there is to know about it.

**BASIRA**

Well, bully for you. Guess you'll just have to make do with what you've got. Since you're about to ask, I'll check in with them again and see if they remember anything else, maybe ask other people about it.

[SOUND OF A DOOR CLOSING]

**ARCHIVIST**

Damn it, I'm willing to bet Elias knows something about it. That's the problem with March of 2015, it's either Gertrude up to something she never finished or Elias doing something evil, isn't it? ...God damn it! I'd never be able to get into his office now that it's occupied by _Peter Lukas_. Melanie might've found something in there when she searched it, but I'm not about to try and contact her again after what happened. _(angrily, mostly at himself)_ 'Not it', Jon. ...Martin could probably access it, but I couldn't put him out like that, either. Of course, I don't see Martin around anymore these days at all, and I'm acutely aware that that's intentional on his part.

 _(miserably)_ Never thought I'd miss a cup of tea so much.

[SHUFFLING OF PAPER]

Statement of Nadia Pierce, regarding her experience in...Zermatt? A-ah, original statement given February 3rd, 2007. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.

**ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)**

I've known Jagger Serana since tenth year, and I have never, ever liked him.

He's always been kind of a jerk. Big jock type, very loud, a player, likes to crack mean jokes. Totally obnoxious in a way that keeps a constant friend circle around him even though a lot of people can't stand him. And he has always, always had a...a _fixation_ on me. I'm not sure if he ever even liked me, but I've had to endure his cheap flirts, his taunts, his leers... No matter how many girls he went through, his eye always floated back to me, and he would always see me every day with some new proposition, sometimes even when he had a girl on his arm at that very moment. Nobody ever stopped him, nobody ever put their foot down and told him to back off, no matter how many times I made it clear I wasn't interested in him, didn't like him, and didn't want anything to do with him. And...I don't think he ever got past that.

I'm not afraid of slinging the r-card, either. Somehow a comment about my darker skin or eyes seemed to make it into at least half of his usual back-handed 'compliments'. It was a very white school, and I'd imagine that had a good amount to do with the fact that the others, even other girls, never really bothered to stop him or at least support me.

So I'm bitter, what of it? I thought that I'd finally be able to escape him when I graduated and went to university...but naturally, he decided to apply at this place too, and somehow got accepted.

It wasn't all bad, for a while there. I didn't have to see him all hours of every day, at least, and he could work out his energy the way college kids do, with drinking and sex with people that weren't me. Even better, I...I got a boyfriend. A guy who genuinely liked me, and who showed me real affection, that I loved more than anything. It was freeing, and after I started dating Oscar, I thought I'd be safer. Not because Oscar was particularly jealous or territorial, but because when Jagger finally swaggered up to me and thumbed his crotch while asking me whether I might give in and be down to see what heat he was packing, I could smugly tell him that sorry, mister, but I've found someone else--someone _better_. I thought finally understanding that I was off-limits, completely unavailable to him, would finally make him throw in the towel and go harass someone else. Now I think I was wrong. Now I think it pushed him over the edge.

He never openly disdained Oscar, and never tried to pick a fight, and for a while the occurrences where I was cornered in a hallway or the parking lot when he wasn't around so I could deal with more aggressive behavior sloped off quite a bit. But he was still there, still around. I'm almost sure he was managing it on purpose, getting his way into all my friend groups so that I always had to endure him whenever I wanted to have fun. Or maybe that's me being paranoid. Whatever the case, I know that he tried to kill me.

And eventually, I was part of the friend group he invited to go skiing and snowboarding with him for Christmas break. No matter how much fun I thought snowboarding would be, no matter how cool I thought a trip to the Matterhorn would be, I was not willing to go if Jagger was hosting it. But Oscar...he really wanted to go. The idea thrilled him, and he said it would be perfect for our first Christmas together to snowboard with each other. He was so excited, it hurts to remember it. I should've put my foot down and told him there was no way we were going.

Oscar Martin Kline was a good man and a sweetheart, and I was in love with him. I really was. He was shy, and sweet, but adventurous, and he never wanted anything more than to find ways to make me happy. He even said he'd teach me how to snowboard, since this would be my first time. Since someone else was paying for it, could I really turn that down?

And then we were on the plane. I had my head on his shoulder and my hand in his, smirking into his neck whenever he told me he totally wasn't afraid of heights, he just preferred the aisle seat because it was _comfier_. We touched down in Germany, and then flew over to Switzerland, and were assigned hotel rooms when we got to Zermatt. I admitted to myself that, even though the guy I hated was hosting, I might could enjoy myself here. There was snowboarding, ice skating, cable cars, and a warm place to sleep in private with a lover. And when the time came, we were all bundled up, me in my earmuffs and him in his beanie. We were trudging up the ideal slope for a first-timer like me, and I blushed when he held my waist and shoulders and showed me how to angle myself on my snowboard. And he snowboarded down alongside me, and I went sprawling because I was trying to check out how he did it while not looking where I was going. But it was fun, and we laughed, and I got it right the second time. We went down that one slope a few times, and I could see the others slowing to a stop about a hundred yards away. Jagger was standing at the bottom, observing the other newbies some distance away. And he looked over at me, right in the eye, just before I heard Oscar tell me that I was probably ready to try a higher slope.

It wasn't that high, just a good bit steeper than the first slope. Oscar wanted to move for a bit, and we found something away from the others that looked simple enough. Relatively linear, not many turns, but a few low snow eddies to jump, and one hill lined by trees that had a gap in the middle so that we could 'thread the needle'. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it probably wasn't an official slope, even though it didn't present much of a challenge. We started up higher, and the first time, we snowboarded alongside one another perfectly, curving around the snow eddies and jumping the hill, and it was fun. Feeling the air rushing across my face and hair while I hung in open air, only to hit the snow going even faster and somehow keep my balance. We had a trip-up, near the end, and the two of us fell off our snowboards just in time to crash into each other, rolling downhill and getting steadily covered in snow until we plowed into the buildup at the base of the slope, spitting out snow and laughing with each other so, so much. It was shaping up to be a perfect day.

But the second time down didn't go like that. I know for a fact we went the exact same way, both uphill and downhill, I remember it perfectly, and there was no way what happened should've been possible. We were sledding down the slope, side-by-side, just close enough that we could both make it through the gap in the trees as we went over the hill. And we did it, and we found ourselves in open air--only, there was no ground beneath us. I mean, there was, but it was so, so far down, I mean hundreds of feet. We'd jumped the exact same hill, but it wasn't the same hill, it was a cliff. We'd just flung ourselves off a cliff so high, it wasn't making sense.

I can remember the picture in front of me as we fell, for the few seconds before everything kicked in and I started screaming. It was a whole mountain range stretching out endlessly before us and beneath us. I could see mountains of black rock with snowcapped peaks everywhere, thousands upon thousands of feet high, and we were heading straight for a huge valley below us. I remember thinking, in those few seconds, that the mountain peaks looked like jagged teeth angled upward to chew and swallow us.

We both caught up with what was going on at the same time, and screaming. I reached out and grabbed his arm in the air, and he grabbed me, too, and we clung to each other as we descended towards the rock and snow way too quickly.

We hit the ground rolling, and it was nothing like the first time. We both stopped screaming only to grunt and cry out as we rolled downward over a stone face barely covered with snow, rolling down, and down, and down. Oscar and I were wrapped arond each other, and it seemed to take forever to hit level ground, and when we finally skidded onto a thick snowfield, we were flung apart, and I stopped first. I was so dizzy, and sore, and absolutely baffled, but I thought we'd made it. After a minute, I called out to Oscar, and he didn't answer, and I pulled my head up off the snow and looked around for him. I saw him laying on his stomach, some twenty feet from me, with his head facing away from me. I scrambled to my feet, clutching my side, and hurried over to help him, thinking he might be unconscious.

He wasn't unconscious. He was dead.

His body had caught the worst of what we'd felt going downhill. His head was broken open across his right forehead, his mouth was slack, and his neck was bent at an odd angle. His eyes didn't see me when I looked into them. When I realized, I screamed, and I cried, and I held him up and started to drag him, screaming for someone, anyone, to help, my boyfriend was injured and needed a hospital, and...there was no one. Of course there was no one, there couldn't have been, wherever we were, it was hundreds of miles away from the Matterhorn. I was on a snow shelf in the middle of some impossible huge mountain range. I screamed and screamed, but somehow I knew that there was nobody around who could help me, no one.

I traveled for hours, maybe days. The sky was a clear, impossibly high blue, outlining all of the teeth in the maw I was now stranded in. Or at least it started that way at first. As I cried out all of my tears and they froze against my face in the bitter cold, as I started to comprehend that Oscar was dead and I was alone, the sky changed. Clouds drifted across it, brushed at first like lazy waves, then covering the sky until the sun shined from behind a silver sheet. I couldn't see any moon. Eventually, it started to snow gently.

I was dangerously close to giving out, but I finally found a cave I could rest in. I dragged his...I dragged Oscar's body to it, and stashed it near the back, then took out my lighter and finally took my snowboard and burned it, setting it alight for warmth. I didn't know what I was going to do except keep moving. But I didn't know why I was even doing that. Oscar was gone. No matter what I did, I was too far from help. Whatever had happened, I was gone, too. I was going to die with the corpse of the man I loved.

The snow drifted to a stop at some point hours later, after I got some rest, though clouds still covered the sky. I decided to go out alone. I decided I had to try one more time, even though it was useless. And I left the cave, trudging out into the snow on foot. I don't know how far I went, but I was finally reaching some other part of the ranges. The snow shelf I was on was giving way to steep ridges and cliffs, that I might be able to make it down in one piece if the snow returned, which it did, about halfway through. Otherwise everything looked the same. No sign of civilization for miles. Just mountains upon mountains, and me, a tiny little speck crawling around on them.

When I had finally walked myself to exhaustion, I decided to go back to the cave. I'd rest, one last time, and I'd stay there, no matter what happened. But by this time, the snow was starting to fall harder, and faster. A brutal wind was starting to pick up and putting a serrated edge to the already bitter chill. I needed to get back before my body gave out. By the time I got back to the cave, a full on blizzard was starting. I finally dragged myself to the mouth, before falling over, and taking out my lighter to start another fire. Until I looked over, and noticed that Oscar's body was gone. I blinked, sure I was imagining things, was delirious from the cold and the trauma, but when I got up and walked over, there was definitely nothing there. Oscar's body was not where I had left him.

And after that, I had to leave again. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that he was dead already, that there was no way I'd mistaken the lack of light behind his eyes. But in the front of my mind, there was a thrill that was equal parts fear and exhilaration. Maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe he'd just been in shock all this time, and woken up and wandered off. Yeah, that had to be it. And if he was out there in the cold, not knowing I was there--I had to go find him. So I left, even in the white-out. Stupid decision, of course, and I don't know what I expected to find but death. But, it wasn't very far out that I found...something.

It was a silhouette that I could see through the blizzard. I thought I was imagining it at first. But as I walked closer, it was his coat, his beanie, his shape. I ran forward, overjoyed, to find him out in the snow and walking towards me, as though he could see me, too. But when I got close, it was all wrong.

It wasn't Oscar. At least, it wasn't _entirely_ Oscar. It was a corpse, but whose, I couldn't be sure. Parts of the face, the hair, the general shape, even the colors of the clothing...half of it was Oscar, my dead sweetheart. The other half was Jagger. A strange, unwelcome amalgam of the two most important men I'd ever met, one who had made me whole and one who'd destroyed me. A sick fusion, someone mocking me, personally. Still dead, despite the fact that it was up and walking and staring very deliberately straight at me. I approached closer, and his frozen lips didn't move. His glassy stare was still definitely dead. There was nothing in this...this zombie-thing, no soul or life at all. Just a body, with no breath in it, made to stab me right where I'd already been hit. I turned around and ran. It was difficult to hear over the wind, but as soon as I turned and fled, I know I heard the crunching of snow. He was following me.

I ran, and ran, unable to see anything anywhere and only being certain that I wanted out, away, gone, any gone. I skidded to a stop right at the edge of the snow shelf. A sheer drop. I had a choice. Stay here with that awful, silent thing that had no life or warmth, or jump. I heard the crunching of snow behind me again. I jumped.

I remember the terror of the drop, heading downward at high speed with air rushing past me, towards an unforgiving stone face that would kill me, but at least it'd be over. The next thing I know, I'm waking up on a slope. It's day time, and I can hear familiar sounds of civilization. I got up, looking around, and although it was difficult to be certain as most of what I could see was snow and sky, I was back in Zermatt.

It was several days after we'd first done our snowboarding. A missing persons search had been set up for me and Oscar, but I was the only one ever found, stumbling back to the hotel half-frozen to death and with bruises and cuts that made the others flinch. Everyone was so thrilled to find out that I was okay, said they'd been so worried. The only one who didn't look happy to see me was Jagger. In fact, I remember him looking distinctly unimpressed while he told me from across the room how relieved he was to see that I had come back alive. I know he did it, I know what he wanted. He'd done this, somehow, he'd deemed me out of his reach and thus could throw me to...whatever it is he threw me to, with abandon. I don't think he counted on Oscar getting caught in it, but I don't think he much cared.

I was taken to a hospital in utter misery. And by the time I got back to London, I realized my victory had been hollow. I wasn't free. _He_ was still following me.

Not Jagger, I mean. The _thing_. The lifeless corpse that isn't a zombie or a person, that has the face of my dead boyfriend fused with the face of my harasser. It appears around me every day, in different spots, doing nothing but stare. And wherever I see him, the warmth drains from the place, bit by bit, the air stagnates, and everyone leaves. I'll be sitting in a cafe, trying to drink a coffee, and once that thing shows up, staring at me from the window outside, it's only a matter before everyone else in the room bleeds out of it, going on about their business until I'm the only one left in the place, alone with it. No one else ever seems to see it but me. But I don't want to see it anymore.

I don't know how much longer I can go on like this. I'd say I'm kept alive by hatred for Jagger Serana, but I don't have any energy for hatred anymore, I just can't muster it up. I just want him gone, and he won't leave. A constant, endless reminder of how I live my life outside the reach of others' love, trapped between those that feign affection and those whose affection was ripped from me.

I just want it to stop.

**ARCHIVIST**

Statement ends.

Well, that's quite...unnerving. You'd think with the things I've seen, and the changes I'm going through, I might not care. But I feel an incredible pity for Miss Pierce. Pity...and an uncanny ability to relate.

So we have a full name, 'Jagger Serana' now. It's...quite a name, honestly. And quite a modus operandi. It's a shame that the figure from the last statement concerning this avatar, 'Kaz', wasn't around to prevent the loss of a life this time. _(sigh)_ I wonder what Basira is up to.

* * *

**BASIRA**

Alright...let's try this again. That look on his face... I just hope she's okay.

[SOUND OF A DOOR OPENING SLOWLY, WITH A CREAK]

[SOUND OF TYPING REACHES THE RECORDER BEFORE COMING TO A HALT]

**ROSIE**

Basira? Was there something else you needed from me today?

**BASIRA**

Um, Rosie...? Are...you okay?

**ROSIE**

Hmm? Yeah, I'm fine, why?

**BASIRA**

You just look a little...well, nevermind. Um, I asked Elias about the missing materials, and he--

**ROSIE**

Oh. I see. I'm, uh--I should probably--

**BASIRA**

No-no, no, he just... He recommended I ask you if you remembered anything about any visitors that day, maybe saw any of them? Anyone that looked suspicious?

**ROSIE**

_(slightly high-pitched)_ Um, this was years and years ago, Basira, I wouldn't rememb--but, well, of course. I can check the visitor records.

[THERE IS THE SOUND OF MORE TYPING AND COMPUTER CLICKING; ROSIE STARTS TO SPEAK MUCH SOONER THAN SHE SHOULD, HOWEVER]

M-March 15th, 2015, five visitors to the Institute on that day. Records indicate that a sixth visitor was recorded but did not sign in...

**BASIRA**

_(deep breath)_ And, do you remember anything about that one visitor?

**ROSIE**

_(as if struggling and failing to restrain herself)_ I...yes. He had...odd scars up and down his arms and neck. Like...branching...

**BASIRA**

Like Lichtenberg figures? Lightning scarring?

**ROSIE**

Yes. Yes, like that.

**BASIRA**

Thanks so much, Rosie. I won't need anything else.

[SOUND OF A DOOR CLOSING]

Sorry, Rosie. I'll give Elias a kick in the dick for you, later. I suppose that clears up _that_ mystery.

_[CLICK]_


End file.
